Posts tagged with "iPad"

Noteshelf 2.1: Dropbox Integration, Finer Ink, New Notebooks

From my Noteshelf review, about a month ago:

What totally convinced me to pick Noteshelf as my go-to app for handwritten notes, though, is wrist protection. When people write, they usually rest their wrist on paper – that’s natural and necessary to have a correct writing position. Well gentlemen, unlike all the other apps available for iPad, Noteshelf has an option to not detect your wrist as an active touch on the screen. Welcome to natural and human writing on a tablet.

As for features I’d like to see besides the upcoming Evernote and Dropbox integration and a template creator, it’d be nice to be able to pinch and zoom on pages, especially in landscape mode. I also don’t like the fact that you can’t select multiple pages when exporting them (email and iTunes are supported).

Noteshelf was already a great iPad app, now it’s even better. With the latest 2.1 update available in iTunes now, the developers added the possibility to export notes as images pr .PDF documents to Evernote and Dropbox, a feature many users have been asking since the first version of the app. Uploading to these services is simple and accessible through a popover menu in the top toolbar. You can also select and export multiple pages via email, or just email a whole notebook. Speaking of which, there are new notebook themes such as music notes and baseball scores. Read more

The iPad Protest

You can add this to the “iPad as a…” list. Spotted by 9to5mac, an iPad has been used in Lithuania during a protest against the government:

If the Western World use iPad for business and entertainment, in Lithuania the iPad is used by pensioners in demonstrations against the government.

Magical?

Readict for iPad Aggregates Twitter and Reader Favorites, But…

I’ve been looking for a very specific type of  app since the iPad came out: something that would allow me to pull content from Twitter and Google Reader favorite items and read it on the iPad. That’s simple. I don’t need tags, categories, offline access or sharing features: if I’ve saved the articles from social networks in the first place, it’s very likely that I won’t send them to Twitter again.

See, I save lots of links both from Reader and Twitter every day: most of them is silly stuff I don’t usually go back to, but a good part of them is made of articles, posts I want to check out later and I’m not sure they need to go into Instapaper. You know what it’s like on Twitter: you put a gold star there, another one here – and you’ve faved 60 tweets on a single day. Same happens on Google Reader.

So like I said, I’m looking for a simple solution to display this content all together so that late in the evening I could sit down with my iPad and enjoy the stuff I saved during the day. This morning I found out about this new iPad app called Readict (free) which promises to aggregate all your favorite items from Twitter and Google Reader. Read more

Smule Wants To Make You A Musician Again With Their Magic Fiddle

There’s no doubt Smule knows how to release popular applications. If you look at their iOS portfolio, there’s not a single app that hasn’t sold thousands and thousands of copies in the App Store: I Am T-Pain, Magic Piano, Ocarina, Glee Karaoke and now, again on the iPad, the new Magic Fiddle.

Just like Magic Piano allowed you to play some sort of digital piano based on its own rules and system, Magic Fiddle recreates a violin on screen you can play with a few taps and swipes. The app is getting rave reviews on many blogs and publications, and while I haven’t tried the app myself (I’m not really a big fan of music apps in general) I have to admit it looks good from the screenshots and video posted by the developers.

The app contains a tutorial section to teach you how to bow, pluck, trill, vibrato and glissandi with your fingers; when you’re good enough to show off your skills, you can play with your friends and aim at the global leaderboards. Graphically speaking, Magic Fiddle looks interesting.

Magic Fiddle is available at $2.99 in the App Store. Check out the demo video below.

Beautiful Modeler Sculpts 3D Models Using An iPad [Video]

Of all the purposes we’ve seen the iPad used for, 3D models are kind of a novelty. Interactive Fabrication released a software tool for “gestural sculpting” which uses the iPad as a multitouch-based remote controller. The software renders 3D models on a Mac, the iPad is used for touch controls up to 5 fingers.

TUAW reports:

As you can see, the iPad works as a controller for the app running on the MacBook, and not only is touchscreen information passed on to the 3D modeling program (I like that multitouch works as well, so you can mold five different points in the sculpture at once), but accelerometer information is also passed across, so tilting the iPad around also tilts the onscreen view.

You can even pass the information along to a 3D printer and get a physical result of what you’ve been creating with the iPad and OS X. The developers released the tool as open source code, it’s available on their website. Check out the video below. Very cool. Read more

How to Read Comics Like a Pro on the Mac & iPad

We here at the MacStories institute of app reviews have a feeling that your stack of Dōjinshi, Green Latern, and The Walking Dead comics have been dwindling at an alarming pace. Surely you could fulfill all your Hentai Manga needs online, but what fun is downloading RAR files just to peep JPEGs when you could get with the times and scoop some CBZ or CBR files from your favorite digital vendors? And no doubt you’ve been pulling shenanigans like scanning Super Man covers into PDFs for easy reading in iBooks instead of faxing ass photos to your boss in Italy. While there’s nothing like tearing the plastic off Wonder Woman, flipping pages is best left for the DC fanatics who have a thing for glossy covers and tongue inspired paper crinkling. It’s time to give comics a quick swift kick in the rear and bring the treasure trove of paneled heroism into the 21st century. That’s what Danger Duck would have wanted right?

Read more

The Incident for iPad Is Coming To Your TV, With iPhone As A Controller [Update: Video]

We are big fans of The Incident by Big Bucket Software. Developed by Panic’s Neven Mrgan and Matt Comi, The Incident is a simple and addictive 16-bit styled game where you control a man named Frank who has to constantly jump and avoid obstacles falling from the sky. From our review:

As Frank, you’ll be climbing your way above and beyond mountains of just about anything that might fall from the sky. Couches, minivans, and propeller blades attempt to crush you under their fantastic weight; even with a little pushing and shoving, you’ll have quite the challenge in avoiding dangers from above and below.

Now, after a 1.2 update that brought game controlling from the iPhone, The Incident 1.3 will come to a TV near you. That’s right: you’ll be able to play an iOS game on your television (just like we always used to, remember?) using the iPhone as a remote controller. No technical details have been provided by the developers yet, except that all you need to get the thing up and running is “pluggin your iPad into the TV”. I guess it’s a standard VGA cable from Apple, anyway. Read more

Apple’s Tablet Computer History→

Apple’s Tablet Computer History

Now that Apple has released the market-leading iPad, with a barrage of other tablet computers and dedicated eReaders flooding the market, it’s worthwhile to look back and see where all of this came from. The focus will be on Apple, and their history with tablet computers.

I didn’t know many of those devices even existed. Great collection.

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Adobe Ideas 1.1 Adds Layers, iOS 4 Support, Goes Universal

A huge update to Adobe Ideas for iPad has been released a few hours ago in the App Store. First off, the app is now Universal for iPhone and iPod Touch, supports the Retina Display and iOS 4 multitasking both on iPhones and iPads. A Universal version of the app was one of the most requested features since the app came out on the tablet, and it’s a great addition to an already popular app.

Then, layers: available as in-app purchase (smart move, Adobe), you can insert up to 10 layers plus a photo layer in each sketch. The user interface for this functionality looks fairly simple and accessible. You can also “redo” actions now. Last, the app is now much faster and optimized for every device.

Adobe Ideas is available for free here. Check out the introductory video below.